Tancredo Neves

Tancredo Neves was elected to end twenty-one years of military rule in Brazil and died before he could be sworn in. He was a lawyer from Minas Gerais who entered politics young and was Getulio Vargas's justice minister at the end, in the government that collapsed with Vargas's suicide in 1954. In 1961 he was the compromise that kept the country from civil war: when the military refused to let Vice-President Joao Goulart succeed, Neves was made prime minister under a hastily created parliamentary system that let Goulart take office with reduced powers. He survived the 1964 coup in opposition, served in the tolerated opposition party through the dictatorship, and became governor of Minas Gerais as the regime opened up. In January 1985 the electoral college - not yet a direct vote, the campaign for which had just failed - chose him as president over the government candidate, with support from defectors from the regime's own party. The inauguration was set for 15 March. On the night of the fourteenth he was taken to hospital with severe abdominal pain and operated on; he underwent seven operations in thirty-eight days and died on 21 April, of a generalised infection. His vice-president, Jose Sarney, a former president of the regime's party, was sworn in instead. The handling of his illness remains disputed. He was sixty-four days from inauguration to death without ever taking the oath, and constitutional lawyers argued afterwards about whether he had been president at all. Millions followed the medical bulletins daily for over a month. The Diretas Ja campaign for direct elections, defeated in Congress in 1984, had made him the compromise candidate of an indirect vote nobody wanted. Direct presidential elections were finally held in 1989.

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